Quranic Optical Text Recognition Using Deep Learning Models

A Quranic optical character recognition (OCR) system based on convolutional neural network (CNN) followed by recurrent neural network (RNN) is introduced in this work. Six deep learning models are built to study the effect of different representations of the input and output, and the accuracy and performance of the models, and compare long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU). A new Quranic OCR dataset is developed based on the most famous printed version of the Holy Quran (Mushaf Al-Madinah), and a page and line-text image with the corresponding labels is prepared. This work’s contribution is a Quranic OCR model capable of recognizing the Quranic image’s diacritic text. A better performance in word recognition rate (WRR) and character recognition rate (CRR) is achieved in the experiments. The LSTM and GRU are compared in the Arabic text recognition domain. In addition, a public database is built for research purposes in Arabic text recognition that contains the diacritics and the Uthmanic script, and is large enough to be used with the deep learning models. The outcome of this work shows that the proposed system obtains an accuracy of 98% on the validation data, and a WRR of 95% and a CRR of 99% in the test dataset.